During the summer, I worked as a research assistant in https://kwonvitallab.github.io/ for project ThriveWell.
Project ThriveWell is an initiative designed to build a rich ubiquitous computing dataset focused on older adults to contribute to Mild cognitive Impairment studies.
Our goal was to develop a mobile application capable of collecting long-term behavioral and activity patterns from participants, enabling quantitative assessment of MCI’s impact on quality of life, mental health, and brain health.
The resulting insights are intended to drive early detection, inform prevention strategies, and enhance healthcare services for at-risk populations.
I joined the team as a UI designer, initially focusing on creating intuitive visualizations of users’ behavioral data within the mobile app.
As I became more familiar with the project, I expanded my role to include developing tools such as a real-time data upload monitoring feature for the admin dashboard and managing the project’s GitHub repository.
I also contributed to team efficiency by documenting troubleshooting methods for common errors and creating a comprehensive data flow diagram outlining the interactions between the app, web platform, and cloud services.
I joined the team with no prior experience in mobile development, making the project a valuable and exciting learning journey. I began by earning a React Native Developer Certificate through Coursera, which gave me the foundation to start visualizing user data in the app.
Along the way, a teammate introduced me to using AWS Lambda functions to fetch data from the cloud-hosted database, which expanded my skills into cloud services and enabled me to build a web-based dashboard.
By the end of the project, I had not only developed key features but also created a comprehensive data flow diagram—a milestone that felt especially rewarding given that, at the start, I didn’t even know how to SSH into the server.
It was a fun summer, and I thank my team and Dr. Kwon for letting me be part of this project